I recently finished a course with my friends Dianne Lee and Martín Antonio Zaldívar-Barragán, “Reckoning with Russia, War, and Ourselves.” We read and discussed Tolstoy, Kuznetsov, Alexievich, and Politkovskaya. I invite you to check out…
War presented itself to him only as a matter of subjecting himself to danger, to the possibility of death, and thereby earning awards, and the respect of his comrades here and of his friends in…
Anna Politkovskaya, A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia Random House, 2007 … the Russian people gave its consent. Nobody stood up. There were no demonstrations, mass…
I think you might appreciate Intractable Woman–a few years ago, I read any book of Anna Politkovskaya I could find translated into English.
440. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. — Herman Melville 464. One of the most…
She represented the honor and conscience of Russia, and probably nobody will ever know the source of her fanatical courage and love of the work she was doing. — Liza Umarova, Chechen singer Colleagues helped…
It is we who are responsible for Putin’s policies, we first and foremost, not Putin. The fact that our reactions to him and his cynical manipulation of Russia have been confined to gossiping in the…
In winter-spring of 2015 I read every book I could find in English translation of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She’s another writer who would be at home in the world of Kafka’s Axe (“But we…
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading…
Sunday 21 June 2015 Dear Isabel Page 2, paragraph 1 About your “fear of rejection”: Do you have a “fear of attraction” as well? I wonder how many people fell in love with you in…